DAMA/Libra claim confirmation of direct dark-matter detection



A recent newspaper story by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/science/space/17dark.html
(probably needs signup-for-user-tracking-registration to view)
and elsewhere
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/17/healthscience/dark.php
reports that
A team of Italian and Chinese physicists on Wednesday renewed a
controversial claim that they had detected the mysterious dark
matter particles that astronomers say swaddle the galaxies in halos
and direct the evolution of the universe.

The team, called Dama, from "DArk MAtter," and led by Rita Bernabei
of the University of Rome, has maintained since 2000 that a yearly
modulation in the rate of flashes in a detector nearly a mile
underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy is the result of the
Earth's passage through a "wind" of dark matter particles as it
goes around the Sun. Other groups of hunters of dark matter have
just as consistently failed to find any evidence of the putative
particles.

At a meeting in Venice, Dr. Bernabei reported that a new, bigger
experiment named Dama/Libra had now observed the same modulation.

Can anyone point to a more technical account of the claim? Is there
a preprint out?

--
-- Jonathan Thornburg <J.Thornburg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
School of Mathematics, U of Southampton, England
"It is especially difficult to find exact solutions of the equations,
as the equations are nonlinear." -- Einstein, fall 1913, discussing
nonlinear gravitational radiation with Born (quoted in MTW chapter 35)

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